Key announcements

Due to maintenance, some of our online forms and systems will be unavailable from 6:00am on Saturday 30 March to 7:00am on Monday 1 April. We are sorry for any inconvenience. To find out more about the section 114 notice, visit our section 114 page

Flood risk plans and strategies

There are a number of local strategies and plans that set out how flood risk in Birmingham is managed, the level of flood risk and actions to manage that risk.

Local Flood Risk Management Strategy

The Council as the Lead Local Flood Authority under the Flood and Water Management Act 2010 has a duty to develop, maintain, apply and monitor the application of a Local Flood Risk Management Strategy in its area. The strategy sets out the objectives for managing local flood risk and the measures proposed to achieve those objectives. The strategy comprises the following documents:

Surface Water Management Plan

Birmingham City Council and its partners have produced a Surface Water Management Plan for Birmingham. It sets out to understand the causes and effects of surface water flooding and establish an action plan that provides the most cost effective way of managing surface water flood risk for the long term.

Due to the number of properties at risk of surface water flooding, it was not possible to understand the flood risk and develop an action plan to manage the risk to every one of these properties. Therefore it was necessary to develop an approach to determine the areas of the City at significant risk that could be assessed within the budget and timescale available for the project.

The study comprises the following documents:

Flood Risk Regulations

The Flood Risk Regulations implement the requirements of the European Floods Directive, which aims to provide a consistent approach to managing flood risk across Europe.

The Flood Risk Regulations set out a six year cycle of planning based on a four stage process, outlined below.

Flood risk management plans must be reviewed by the Environment Agency and Lead Local Flood Authorities (LLFAs) every 6 years under The Flood Risk Regulations 2009 (legislation.gov.uk).

Flood risk management plans describe how the Environment Agency and risk management authorities (RMAs) are working with communities to manage current and future risk of flooding, and identify actions to manage those risks.

Following a public consultation, the first flood risk management plans were published in March 2016, and described actions to manage flood risk across England between 2015 to 2021.

The Environment Agency and LLFAs are currently producing new draft plans to cover the period from 2021 to 2027.

A 3 month public consultation on the draft plans will run from 22 October 2021 to 21 January 2022.

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